'MAVERICK' CAMEO MADE MATTEA'S YEAR

Kathy Mattea's movie debut, coming to theaters this spring, is a cameo in the Mel Gibson film Maverick.

She plays the naggish companion of Waylon Jennings, who portrays a gambler. The plot puts the two on a riverboat whose gaming stakes are so prohibitive that guns are forbidden, and Mattea gets Jennings and herself both booted off the vessel when she drops her purse and a pistol pops out.

"Our scene may be 15 seconds long if it doesn't end up on the cutting-room floor," Mattea said.

"But when they said, 'Come do a cameo,' I thought I would just be sitting next to somebody at a table or something and (viewers) would look up and say, 'Oh, there's Kathy Mattea.' I had no idea the camera would be three feet from my face!

While the cameo may be a pleasant career footnote for the West Virginia-born Mattea, 1994 will be a critical year for her because she has been battling something of a career dip.

She has a new album scheduled for April release, and she has put together the Red, Hot and Country album to benefit AIDS research. That album also is scheduled for April release.

Mattea gradually has taken much of the control of her own career, recently changing producers twice and seeking new directions, but it is the AIDS battle that seems to have made the most difference in her career.

She points out that she has not deliberately sought controversy by tackling the issue.

"I'm not Miss Controversial. . . . This is the first time I've ever gotten involved in anything political. I have fear about it, too, I have to tell you. Sometimes I get afraid that I won't do it right or I'll say something wrong. I'm a person who doesn't want to rock the boat."

Thanks more to Mattea than anyone else, however, Nashville has begun to recognize the AIDS crisis.

Feeling a responsibility to try to help raise public consciousness about the crisis, Mattea made a few discreet remarks on a couple of award shows - and ended up with responsibility for the Red, Hot and Country project.

She said she then wrote letters to music friends inviting them to participate, receiving responses that ranged from enthusiastic to "no response, never calling back, no yes, no no, no nothing.

"There was a point where I thought, 'We're just not ready yet to do this,' " she said. "Then people sort of started turning around."

Mattea got pushed into the Nashville forefront of the AIDS campaign in the fall of 1992 when the Country Music Association decided to differ from the Hollywood community's award shows by handing out green, environmental-awareness ribbons instead of red AIDS-awareness ribbons. Asked in an interview about her reaction, Mattea said she "would be happy to wear a green ribbon, but I'm (also) going to wear a red ribbon."

A newspaper blew the comment into a confrontation, and the CMA announced it would hand out red ribbons as well as green ones. Then another Nashville newspaper article "publicly challenged" Mattea to "put my money where my mouth was" by explaining to viewers of the show what the ribbons stood for.

"I thought, 'I've got to do this,' " she said. "Waiting backstage during the commercial, I just walked off by myself and closed my eyes and took a deep breath and tried to listen for some kind of answer. I was terrified! I was on this emotional roller coaster where some days I would think, 'It's the '90s - how controversial can AIDS be?' And I had days when I'd think, 'I'll never work in this town again.' "

She obviously continues to work in Nashville, and it so far is unclear whether her AIDS activism has had anything to do with a dip in her record sales.

Her last album, Lonesome Standard Time, is her career's best. But in more than a year on the market it so far has managed merely "respectable" sales of 400,000 or so. That, however, isn't necessarily attributable to activism; the album that preceded Lonesome Standard Time was a Celtic-influenced package that was obviously aimed outside the country mainstream.

Asked her own opinion on whether her AIDS work prompted the disappointing sales of Lonesome Standard Time, Mattea said that the Nashville ribbon controversy did erupt the month the album was released.

"I've had people ask me about that," she said, "and I guess for me it's like, if that was it, dwelling on it is going to make me bitter. I want to take responsibility for the record not doing as well as I had hoped. I had switched producers, and I think people were expecting it to sound more different from my previous records.

"I don't want to say to myself, 'Well, it's just because you said something about AIDS.' That would make me really sad - not for me, but for the industry, the audience, the people."